Pontus Strimling

Strimling is Professor of Analytical Sociology at Linköping University's Institute for Analytical Sociology and Research Leader on New Technologies and the Future of Humanity at the Institute for Futures Studies.

His research treats societal change as something that can be modelled: patterns visible at the level of a whole population emerging from an enormous number of individual events and encounters. Drawing on cultural evolution and social psychology, he builds mathematical models of how norms and opinions are created, sustained and overturned, with the aim of predicting which will prevail.

That work has been applied to moral change in particular, from opinions on same-sex marriage and abortion to forecasts for roughly a hundred moral issues over the coming decade in the United States, and to cross-cultural studies of how people in dozens of societies judge norm violations.

He is a founder of the Global Social Norms network, which coordinates studies of opinion change across more than 130 countries, and leads the AI Futures Project, which develops interactive forecasting models and scenarios for when human-level AI capabilities might arrive.